This article, Delaying babies 'defies nature' has got me seething. It's not that I dispute the facts (which are nothing new), it's the condescending, paternalistic way the story is told. I first read it on the Daily Mail site ( Heartache of late motherhood) and chalked it up to the rantings of the tabloid press, but today I saw the same story picked up by the BBC, and told with the same "it's too bad girls want to wait until they have careers and stable relationships before they have kids". Never mind that most people don't even *meet* their partners before they are 30, or that with the cost of higher education these days, many people are mired down in school debts until their early 30s or that the vast majority of people have have barely had enough experience to manage their own lives in their 20s, never mind being responsible for the scads of babies they're supposed to be having at that point. Medical science has made advancements in almost every possible area of human development, so instead of focusing on returning the role of women to that of the 1950s, why don't we focus on helping slightly "older" women achieve healthy pregnancies? The pharmaceutical industry spent enough time and money on developing drugs to allow lecherous old men to annoy their wives in perpetuity (something certainly nature had *not* intended), so it seems that giving nature a helping hand is something only men should be able to profit from. I can't believe that articles like this are still getting published in 2005!!!

Ugh. This makes me sick. First of all, I didn't want to wait, but hey, I didn't find my husband until I was 26, didn't get a proposal until I was 29, couldn't plan the wedding before I was 30, and finally spent four years convincing him that yes, he'd be a good father, only to lose both of the pregnancies I wanted so badly once we finally started trying.

I could vent like this for hours, but it's like preaching to the choir, I know. :) Thanks for calling my attention to this though!

(BTW, you and I post on a lot of the same blogs -- Julie's, Laura's, etc. -- but I've never visited until now... will keep reading.)

Yeah, that article pissed me off too. There's no support at either end of the age spectrum, for those of us who wait we are 'unnatural' and for those of us who get knocked up at 20 (or sooner) we are 'ruining our futures' - there's not really any middle ground here. And our children are seen at risk at either end too, at the 'too young' end because our supposed immaturity and financial instability, and at the 'too old' end our aged eggs are producing 'kids at risk'.

Whatever!

i suppose it would have been better if i had married one of the losers i dated in my 20s. it would have been great for my 3.5 kids to be subjected to parents who hate each other, their father's substance abuse, their mother's mental illness, etc. yes, good plan. definitely what nature intended.

I guess I don't see the same things you all see. To me, there is no intent to return women to 1950s roles, but rather to better inform women of the biological risks of waiting to have children.

Catherine, I just think that most people are all too aware of the potential risks of having children later. "Waiting" to have children often doesn't always come into it, as much as "waiting" to meet the right partner (which would be nice if it happened in your 20s, but doesn't always work out that way). The slant of article seemed to be that women were selfishly pursuing higher education and careers and then just expecting to have easy-breezy pregnancies in their mid-to-late 30s. I just don't think that reflects the reality.

I don't see that at all...in fact it says...

In the BMJ, the specialists write: "Paradoxically, the availability of IVF may lull women into infertility while they wait for a suitable partner and concentrate on their careers and achieving security and a comfortable living standard."
...
"Their delays may reflect disincentives to earlier pregnancy or maybe an underlying resistance to childbearing as, despite the advantages brought about by feminism and equal opportunities legislation, women still bear full domestic burdens as well as work and financial responsibilities."


That doesn't seem like any sort of judgment...as much as an analysis of the competing decisions women face (exactly the point you all make about the reasons to wait). I just don't see how everyone sees this article as condescending or paternalistic. There is nothing offensive in this unless you are interpreting a woman's desire to find a suitable partner and be stable as being judged negatively (selfish). But I'm just not getting that from this article. It seems to acknowledge those as reasons women wait...but I'm not seeing where it judges those reasons as being selfish or invalid in any way. What am I missing?

Catherine -- It's probably just me being paranoid, but I interpreted: "the availability of IVF may lull women into infertility" as being judgmental. And as I said before, the emphasis seems to be on changing women's decisions about delaying motherhood, rather than helping them achieve healthy pregnancies.

"Where we can, we should be helping women to have children earlier."
"The biological clock is one thing we cannot reverse or change."
"The message that needs to go out is 'don't leave it too late'."

I mean, why does it seem so impossible that medical science could reverse or change the biological clock? We're already living longer and with a better quality of life in our later years, thanks in part to the advancements of medicine. 20 years ago, women over 40 had very negligible chances of having healthy children, but now those chances are greatly increased. 20 years from now it could be that most women in their 50s would have a pretty good chance of getting pregnant if they want to (and if we're all living to be 120 by then, that doesn't seem such an outlandish idea). (And I know that women in their 50s are getting pg. now via assisted reproduction, but it's still a very rare occurrence.)

The very women who are "delaying" motherhood because of school and careers, are intelligent enough to understand that getting (and staying) pg. may not be the piece of cake it might have been 10 years prior -- I really don't think they need reminding.

This makes me raging mad and I don't quite get what "solution" they are calling for. Encouraging women to get pregnant earlier? How do you do that? Perhaps things like real childcare choices would help...but still. argh.

The very women who are "delaying" motherhood because of school and careers, are intelligent enough to understand that getting (and staying) pg. may not be the piece of cake it might have been 10 years prior -- I really don't think they need reminding.

But see, that's the whole point of the article. That women may believe that medical science can make it happen...when they can't. That's the whole point. Women may be smart, but they put their trust in what they hear from the media about older women having babies...and they don't accept that that is the exception NOT the rule. Fact is, smart women ARE lulled into a sense that they can postpone babies. If I find the perfect man and wait three years until my career is established and this and that and this and that...then if I have trouble I'll just see a doctor and s/he'll fix me up...1-2-3, I'll have my baby. And it isn't that easy...you and I both know that.

Why doesn't medical science focus on finding a solution? They are. They've made great strides in women's health over the past 50 years, for example. But there is a long way to go and it may take another 50 before infertility is a thing of the past. Like you said...20 years from now it could be that most women in their 50s would have a pretty good chance of getting pregnant if they want to. But most women don't have that much time to make a choice about having kids. See the problem? If you tell a now 20 year old to balance her hopes of a family on the progression of medical achievements in this area, she might be very disappointed in 20 years.

I do agree that the solution suggested seems quite vague. But I'm not sure they were really exploring that as much as they were exploring the opposing forces that have created infertility problems for a lot of women.

I'm not trying to debate...and I'm not saying it isn't good to ask that we can "have it all." But right now, we can't. We can look for options to make it better in the future...but until the solution comes around, we have to accept that we can't have it all. We are not biologically programmed to be able to have children all our lives. That's just plain science...not subjective criticism (sp?).

But people already understand this concept; it's not a new idea. And reiterating it only makes anyone who is struggling with infertility (for *whatever* reason) after age 35 to feel like they don't deserve proper care or that they themselves are culpable for their infertility.

I did not put off childbearing until my mid-thirties purposefully, that's just when I happened to meet my partner. If we had met earlier, perhaps we would have started the whole baby thing earlier, I don't know.

Anyway, I understand your take on the article. Let's just hope that it's not being published again 20 years from now...

we seem to have had a rant on the same thing, from different perspectives, but with the same conclusion.